The Ramones Part III-got wierder

The Ramones: Part Three

Crazy Mama’s was cut in half by a steep stairwell. On the north end of the room there was the bar and a tiny area filled with Formica tables and hard plastic chairs that were most often found in elementary school cafeterias, the easier to wipe them down. To the left of the bar was another tiny room with a pinball machine and one of those machines you could blow into to see if you were too drunk to drive. To the right of the bar was the dance area, small, sticky, and packed to the gills with sweaty bodies dotted by black dyed spiky hair, pierced lips, leather jackets, and more borderline disorders than a community mental health center. A huge mirror ball hung down and splashed white-light reflections over the herky-jerky and morose bodies, and the reflections went on into eternity as all the walls were covered with mirrors. There was a doorway that sat on the other side of the stairwell that connected the dance floor to the sitting area. It was used by those who wanted to avoid the rush of the bar, and it was here that the skinheads were congregating, apparently spoiling for a fight with anyone who dared venture into their territory.

I sat at a table with my two beers, milking the bubbles spiraling from the dark bottles for the courage to twist myself about on the dance floor. I just need to collect my wits. Between the sparkles of the bursting white lights that flecked the pulsating bodies in a projection of phosphorescence the made every person quiver in the haze of smoke and the discomposure amplified by the guitars blaring from the speakers, the room shook with the energy of stripling sexuality fueled by the eagerness that alcohol imbues.  I gazed at my shoes, cracked black leather with heels burnished raw—a fantastical thrift store find that were discarded once and needed to be again. My jeans were frayed, a hairy knee poking out as if it were a rodent looking for a moment to cut free.  I swallowed the last of my beer and walked towards the dance floor. Spinning onto it in swirl of fluid movements, I skirted across the floor, the worn leather soles gliding in the spilt beer as the moment where guitar combines with dance shut the rest of the world out.

The next song, “One Last Caress” by the Misfits, was the most beautiful ode to murder and rape ever written. Part macho bombast, part crooning Jim Morrison, and all Ramones derivative.  That little muscle bound dwarf Glenn Danzig rode a spark of glory for one set of anthem evil demos before morphing into a farcical cartoon of himself. Barely over a minute and a half, enough time to dig into the subconscious isolation that the best punk rock brings to live action. In a moment the DJ blended into “Bring on the Dancing Horses,” perhaps sensing that the tension in the room was now palpable. Echo and the Bunnymen penned a few outright hymns of geeky cockiness for the mascara drenched and lovelorn who brandished tattoos under fishnet stockings, spiky hair, and black lipstick. The whole room swayed to the words of disintegrating love. Wrought over the unfulfilled passions of their twenties, couples collapsed into one another.

As the song petered out I headed to the bar to fetch another drink or two. I stepped around two of the skinheads who were discussing the sudden change to “fuckin’ pussy music.” As I listened to the DJ playing the heartstrings of the mirror people, and Julian Cope instructed the world to shut its mouth, Keith came upon me and said, “Mate, those fuckin’ skinheads are fuckin’ with me.” He gestured over his shoulder towards several glaring skinheads who wore their uniforms of intimidation as if they had picked them from the rack at the local JC Penney’s: ankle high boots with white shoelaces pulled tight, white t-shirts, and gray suspenders making a perfect “X” across their broad backs. They looked menacing, but that was half the battle they were waging. There were roughly seven of them, but through the lens of drunken history and the perturbation of the moment, I can’t recall with certainty. They smiled at us,

“Um, those skinheads over there?” I asked, as if there were skinheads in every pocket of the club.

“Yeah, especially the big fucker.” Keith was short in stature and handsome, with long curly golden locks that had seduced many a beautiful girl. He oozed easy charm and in our own personal battles of seduction he clearly had the battle won before even engaging in conversation.  The big fucker was a big fucking skinhead. He was nearly a head taller than me, with a crooked grin and his big fucking shaved head, the baldness speaking volumes of fear.. We walked over, feeling braver than I ever should have, with guts full of alcohol and a temperament that was as shaky as North Korean foreign policy. I put my beers down on table next to the doorway.

Keith stood next to me. He was smiling. Perhaps the friction of violence energized him or perhaps he didn’t really think there would be violence. With a history of barroom brawls and some frequent ass beatings by my older brother while growing up, I wasn’t scared to take a punch. I also knew when to quit. One skirmish I got in off of Chittenden Avenue lasted one gigantic swing and a miss. If it would have connected, perhaps I would have been like the great home-run/strike-out champion, Dave Kingman for a day, but if I missed I was still Dave Kingman. On Chittenden, the gentleman smiled and punched me square in the front teeth. I yelled out, “Owww!, Ohhh, that hurt! Okay, you win,” and walked over to pick up my pizza, wiggling my front teeth all the way home as the big galoot hollered at me, “Hey, you can’t quit after one punch.” Turning I explained, “Listen, I gave you my best shot, you hit me in my teeth. I It hurts, so you win. I’m going home and eating pizza.”

Knowledge carries a lot in any experience. I don’t believe that Keith had ever taken a punch let alone thrown one. I knew that most bar or street fights ended quickly, in fact mostly in a matter of seconds after three or four punches, the majority never connecting. Take two drunken men, place them in a smoke-filled room with loud music and other people and ask them to try to hit one another and most likely you’ll end up with a PG-13 version of America’s Funniest Home Videos. I leaned up into the big skinhead’s face, stared into his eyes and said, “Hey, are you fucking with my friend here?”

Noticing that several of the smaller skinheads had gathered around him, as if they were the stink on his shit, he smiled and said, “What the fuck is it to you.” As he glanced at his skinhead buddies for support, I hit him right in the chest and he toppled over like a drunken man is prone to do. Immediately, regret rained over me as several of his team plowed into me as if I were a tackling dummy. I was clutching my thick plastic brown glasses in my hand. Flipping over a table with our momentum, I yelled to Keith as I felt big- leather skinhead boots kicking my ribs

I thought, “Oh yeah, these guys kick, I forgot about that. They fight in packs.” I felt a boot against the back of my head, and got scared. Being a twisty sort, I had perfected the practice of escaping from years of fleeing my brother. I held onto one guy’s leg and turned into it. When he fell over I scrambled away and headed towards the stairs. Keith was nowhere to be found.

I ran into Pearl Alley, which runs parallel with High Street, cut through another small alley, and was back on High Street. I ran all the way to Larry’s, where I knew I would be safe. Nothing felt like comfort than being part of something where everybody knew your name, your choice of drink and easily submerged themselves into your drama. I ran like a fat kid from school. I felt some blood dripping down my neck, but it did not seem too bad.

Bursting through the doors of Larry’s I went up to the bar and asked, “has Keith shown up?”

Becky, the tall bartender, looked aghast and said, “No, what happened? Your head is bleeding a little,” as she handed me a drink. There is nothing better for a concussion than a few alcoholic beverages.

“We got jumped by some fucking skinheads at Crazy Mama’s. I didn’t see Keith.” I retold the story to others and the woman I was supposed to meet seemed to enjoy it. “This may work in my favor,” I thought.

Roughly an hour later, Keith sauntered into the bar, flashing his white teeth and grinning. “Oh, thank God you’re okay, mate. As soon as you were flung over that table, I ran. They chased me all the way to 15th Avenue. I didn’t know where to go, so I ran into a party and they were going to kick me out until…I pulled out that bag of weed! It fuckin’ did come in handy!

Two days later we arrived in Cincinnati to meet up with the Ramones. We had backstage passes and saw the show from the wings of the stage, drinking the backstage Heinekens. Joey said that they waited until five because they wanted to take us out to eat but couldn’t wait any longer. Johnny asked if I had brought his copy of the Wild Angels soundtrack. I had forgotten it, so he said, “Well, next year I’ll pick it up.” At the end of the show, Keith pulled out his camera. I suggested he take a photo of the costume cabinets—those huge black leather cabinets found backstage at Broadway shows. Written in white spray paint on the side was “Ramones” and inside there were four leather jackets on hangers. The band had changed into normal, casual t-shirts, and I don’t recall them drinking any alcohol. They were truly salt of the earth. There never was a next year. They never returned to Columbus and broke up about a year and a half later. I still have Johnny’s copy of Wild Angels. If anybody knows his widow, I would love to return it to her.

perhaps an ever better m version by Dave Pajo:

not to be confused with the bad skinheads:

 

Jerry Wick and Jenny Mae: Part 52–The Ramones past II

Ramones, part two

Bruno, my blond-haired, blue-eyed, energy-at-11 boy but age at 4, loves punk rock. We get in the car and he asks, “Daddy, can we listen to punk rock?” His sister, who has a remarkable fondness for opera and classical music, is under his shrieking assault as to what is played on our morning drive to school. “No! Saskia, we have to listen to PUNK ROCK!” Something about guitars tends to move our joined hearts.

The other day I walked out of the courtroom where I work and noticed a young woman, sitting in the blue felt and partially stained chairs in the hallway as she casually tried to look cool with a tint of blue hair hanging like a dropped flower over heavily mascara eyes, her legs pulled tight under her with a snippet of torn fishnet stocking poking from under frazzled blue jeans. To top off her ensemble she was wearing a faded, black Ramones T-shirt, the one with the Ramones Presidential seal. As I took her back to my office to conduct her assessment, I wanted to tell her of my personal Ramones experience, as if this would help bridge the therapeutic relationship between a 19-year-old, mentally-ill heroin addict and a graying 44-year-old man wearing a wrinkled dress-shirt and a tie with a dollop of jelly. I decided not to.

 

After Keith and I drank our fill at Larry’s, we decided to head down to the Newport, the large concert hall on High Street. My own experiences at the Newport were tenuous, as I had had a difficult experience with several bouncers at a dynamic triple bill of Th’ Faith Healers, The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, and the Breeders. I had ended up losing my temper and clocking a man several times my weight, after which his coworkers dragged me out by my neck, my feet dangling under me like a chicken carried across the barnyard, with me clutching my dark-rimmed glasses that were not built for barroom skirmishes. Bob Pollard was in line while I was on my way to being flung out the front door. He said, “Hey Bela, do you need help?” and then, upon noticing the thick-necked, beefy men escorting me out, “Uh, never mind!”

I had also managed to criticize the Newport management in one of the weekly papers for their lack of support of local and underground music in their pursuit of money, which was not the wisest move. At times, my own sideline hobby of promoting music was hindered by this “Fuck you” attitude toward the local corporate rock scene, as many of the bands that I had booked into Columbus who had risen to the status of playing a room the size of the Newport left me out in the dark when I could have had a nice payday for my earlier efforts. I had explained a part of this to Johnny Ramone, and he instructed Keith and me to come to the rear of the Newport to pick up some backstage passes after I assured him that my name would be crossed off the guest list for my past behavior.

Keith was excited, repeating, “The fucking Ramones, wow, can you believe it? The fucking Ramones, they know my name.” I was excited, but more so because I was to meet a woman at Larry’s after the show. We were to meet around midnight, which meant we were really just meeting to have sex.

The back of the Newport bordered Pearl Alley, and a large tour bus with a Western sunset motif painted along the side was parked next to the club. There was a small line of young women standing outside the back stage door that sat atop a small fire escape. With beer and whisky breath we stood on the crunchy gravel, keeping our distance from the chattering, nervous young punk rock women waiting to meet the elder statesmen of American punk rock. Suddenly, the Ramones tour manager, a dark-haired man wearing mandatory Ray-Ban sunglasses and chewing gum, appeared to be arguing with several staff members of the Newport. Another man in a brown suit appeared, clean-cut and holding a walkie-talkie, and yelled above the burgeoning din, “You guys have been selling your passes to all these girls all night. The show is sold out and none of your passes are good anymore!”

Mr. Ray-Ban yelled back, “That’s bullshit, you can’t do that! Show me the proof!” Keith and I looked at each other. How odd this all seemed.

Abruptly, Joey was on the scene, with his thin, angular frame and wearing a T-shirt. He pointed towards Keith and me, standing in the parking lot, giggling to ourselves. “Hey, I don’t know about all these girls, but those two guys get passes.”

Mr. Brown-Suit looked down at us, “I don’t care who it is, nobody else is getting in!”

Joey scoffed, “They don’t get in, we don’t play!”

I looked over at Keith, “This is fucking crazy.”

“Yup,” he said with a nod. It went back and forth for a few minutes.

Finally, Joey came down the stairs with Mr. Ray-Ban. “Hey, someone in our crew was selling our back-stage passes and they won’t let us. Why don’t you guys come up to Detroit tomorrow and we’ll get you in then?”

The next day was a Sunday. “I can’t, I have some family stuff going on,” in reality knowing a full-on hangover would impede driving the three hours to Detroit, getting drunk again, and driving back.

“How about Cincy, we’ll be there in two days?” This worked and we agreed to see them in Cincinnati.

Keith and I looked at each other as if we were being filmed for a sitcom. “Did Joey Ramone just say they wouldn’t play unless we were will allowed in?” I asked Keith.

Keith nodded, “Yeah, he said, if the two record store guys don’t get in, we don’t play.” I had a feeling it could have stemmed from my being banned from the venue for that idiotic move of slugging the bouncer. “Well, now what?” Keith asked.

“Well shit, we’re already on South Campus, so let’s go to Crazy Mama’s.”

Nodding, “Yup, sounds cool, might was well dance.”

As we started walking away, a bespectacled man with a beard right out of a King Crimson gatefold record cover, complete with pot seeds in the bent spine, yelled after us. “Hey guys, hold up. The fellas feel terrible and are embarrassed you couldn’t see the show, so I wanna help you out a little.” He explained that he was one of the roadies and drove their bus, the huge concert bus with a Western motif airbrushed on the side—a perfect cover for one of the most essential punk rock bands in history. He led us to the bus, telling us he was from Poland, Ohio, and had been with the Ramones for nearly ten years. “The best band you could hope to work for, even if they don’t talk to each other much. Total class guys. Salt of the earth.” As he was talking he pulled a baggie out of a worn, green satchel that was filled with marijuana. “Hey, this is for you guys, for your trouble,” and he tossed it to me.

I explained to him, “Man, we don’t need this, I don’t even smoke—I only drink.”

He smiled, “Hey, it’ll come in handy sometime.”

Keith grabbed it, “Shit, I know some girls who smoke,” and he tucked it into his pants. We thanked the bus driver from Poland, Ohio, assured him we would be in Cincinnati in a few days, and trudged off to get our dancing shoes on.

The night was strange, with an eerie energy that was fueled by our intake of Jim Beam and Black Label throughout the afternoon and evening. But South Campus in 1994 was much different than the sparkling new buildings and movie theater of the Ohio State University campus today. At the time, it was lined with bar after bar that made money selling an abundance of alcohol at a cut-rate, served in plastic pitchers and wash-buckets of beer, all with a fine film of grease floating on top. One could get shots of peach or peppermint  schnapps for a mere dollar, and before stumbling home at the end of the evening, clutching hard against the person who would quiet one’s loneliness for a few hours, a person could grab a gyro for only a dollar—a perfect mint to share kisses with at 3 am. The street would be lined with cops on the weekend, some on horseback trotting over to break up fights and to help guide the lines into the packed, smudgy bars, pulsating with sounds of Bananarama, The Cure, Ah-Ha, and if one were lucky enough, New Order or The Clash. One bar even made a Sunday evening of playing mostly AC/DC and The Cult, a choice that was popular at the time but in hindsight was about as short-sighted sonically as Ian Asbury singing for The Doors.  Columbus’s finest would line thin wires around the telephone poles so no future politicians, doctors, engineers, or teachers would drunkenly slip off the curb into an oncoming giant pick-up truck from one of the nearby rural burgs that dotted the adjacent counties.

I had shed South Campus several years prior. My drinking tastes no longer required me to search for the cheapest beer around, and the clientele of these establishments only pushed my buttons as I was just as likely to lose my temper with frat-boy lunk-heads or what I assumed were silly coeds. Besides, I had moved up north, closer to the store, near Larry’s and Stache’s——a convenient walk from any of these hangouts with little to no danger of getting into a row.

“Let’s take the alleyway, that way we don’t have to deal with the bullshit of High Street,” I suggested to Keith.

“Good call, man, that shit gotten even crazier, didn’t it?” I was drunk. We stopped at UDF to share a 40 ounce in the alley as we needed to feed the buzz lest it be too diminished before we completed the three-block walk to Crazy Mama’s.

“To be honest Keith, that was some really weird shit. I mean, it was like they were honored to know us, not vice-versa.” We hustled to the alley, pulling swallows from the bottle, and had finished it by the time we got to Crazy Mama’s. Dumping the empty bottle in a dumpster, I remarked to Keith, “It’s amazing that these dumbasses can’t seem to do this. Here we are drunker than shit and we know enough to throw our bottle away.”

Crazy Mama’s had steep stairs and as we climbed them we could feel the sweat inside the room. Bauhaus was playing. “I dunno Keith, they’re playing gothic shit tonight, maybe we should just go back to Larry’s.”

“We’re already here, besides some gothic chicks are sexy.”

Rolling my eyes, I said, “Whatever.” It was packed, with a whole slew of folks we hadn’t seen and a lot of punks from out of town, including a group of skinheads that lurked on one side of the dance floor on the opposite of the bar. “I don’t have a good feeling about this,” I murmured to Keith. I hated crowds. Especially drunk crowds. With skinheads. Suddenly “Beat on the Brat” exploded over the bar, and I said, “Cool, we’ll stay” as I grabbed three beers, two for me and one for Keith.

Part three sometime in the future.

Part 51: First Christmas

Part 51: 1st Christmas

I drove several cars that were bound together with loose ends, one with a starter held in place by the end of a broom handle and it was not uncommon for a few bolts to be laying in the gravel driveway when I pulled out, bald tires struggling to gain traction on the small gray pebbles. Every car ride was a trial in hesitation, deep breaths as the engine struggled to turn over, at times a small billow of smoke emanating from the hood, was it more oil leaking or had that brave wooden handle finally caught fire? there was no money in my wallet, a small black cracked bit of leather I had been given after my grandfather had died. It never had any money in it when he owned it as well. At times, I would look in it, hoping that maybe, just maybe a five dollar bill would appear, but it only held an old Social Security card, a blemished and forged ID and my own driver’s license. Getting gas money was a trial in itself, a mad scramble around the house, pushing aside couch and chair cushions in search of loose change, a return of a few Coca-Cola bottles and a quick rummage through my step fathers change jar that sat atop his misty room. Sunshine illuminating the gray room with specks of dust, in calm panic pushing aside old buttons, scraps of paper with scribbled phone numbers and empty match books, grabbing a handful of change, hoping that there was more silver and copper. If luck was with me, there may be $1.75 or so to put into the tank. Gas was hovering around a dollar a gallon, and a gallon and a half could get an anxious high school boy to school and back a few times. Taking the bus was unheard of, an exercise in self oppression that one would avoid at all costs. It was better not to go to school than to take the nausea inducing trail of fear over the rolling hills and creaky shocks that was part and parcel of the bus number 24.

A date, perhaps the first one with a girl from my high school, even though I was halfway through my senior year, the mutual attraction between myself and the girls of Northeastern was unspoken at best, and most likely in complete abstinence. In the world of avoidance that I tended to move in a furtive glance was what I would hope for, perhaps a short moment of sparkle as quip would dart out of my mouth would give me a moment of hope but usually my own neediness in a mountain of farmer boy machismo would have prevented even the most interested gal to think secondly. My high school dates involved girls from other schools or more often during my summer and spring breaks in Athens where it was ok to wear glasses and be of minor stature.

The snow fell in clumps, big, fat flakes that swirled in circles before nestling atop a field of other frozen particles. The rolling hills leading into Catawba were shrouded in white, at times the snow fell so heavily that the road melded into the side of the road, causing the relic of a Toyota to work extra hard as brakes were pushed and coaxed into keeping the orange metal on course. There was sweat dripping from my hands, and next to me there was a portable Panasonic cassette player with failing batteries but was a better alternative to the generic teased hair music that was prevalent in the mid-west during the mid-nineties eighties. Driving with a slight amount of the overpowering testosterone  that coursed through my body, a permanent hard-on for the past four years of my life had now blended into the reality of a date. Passing barns that appeared asleep, with the white powder of snow freezing them into what appeared to a postcard of a fast vanishing America, the car galloped over paltry hills that were more mounds than hills. Catawba lay on a small bluff, that overlooked several large fields of corn and soybeans, with an abandoned corn mill on the edge of town, it provided a picturesque view of the town but upon closer inspection the years of neglect wore off its lumbering metal sides through chestnut colored rust as it crawled alongside of the mill like a giant spider web. Everything in this town failed the scrutiny test, from the perspective on my seventeen year old eyes, but now as the old mill faded into the mist of snow in a cracked rearview mirror held in place by shiny duct tape, that was no concern of mine.

South Vienna, which some of us referred to as “South-by-God-Vienna!” was roughly six miles or so from Catawba, it was itself a tiny burp of a town, located between I-70 and the old National Road, it almost dwarfed Catawba as it had at least five traffic lights, curbs, a carpet store and a grocery. Jenny lived at the edge of town, in a small ranch right smack dab in the middle of the National Road. The car chugged and surged in the snow, with small burps of exhaust it behaved like the Engine-That-Could while snow swirled around in a winter ballet of young lust and the hope of opportunity. I knocked on the door, trying to make the large lenses on my wire framed glasses smaller by leaning away from the porch light. I wore a bigger-than-me camouflaged US Army jacket that my brother had brought me back from his first foreign deployment in Germany. Jenny answered, and I as I stepped hesitantly into the living room, I eyed her family as much as they eyed me. A little boy lay on the carpet with tiny action figures spread around as if they had been blown apart, two younger sisters lay on opposite end of the couch, staring into the television. One I recognized, Rachel, who nodded at me. She was a freshman. The other just a few years older than the boy, said “hey,” and resumed watching the television. Jenny’s mother, got up from an yellow easy chair, “well, you’re this Bela everyone has been talking about. I have heard so much about you, Jenny says you are very funny. And you live in Catawba, did Jenny tell you we used to live there. I grew up in Catawba. You can see how far, I’ve come,” laughing she added, “all the way to South Vienna.” Wearing a shaky smile, I stammered, “yeah, um, yeah, hmmm….Jenny’s pretty funny herself.” “well, I’m Ginger, and welcome to our house” she turned her head, and raised her voice towards the kitchen, “Harry, Jenny’s date is here!”

Upon those words, the insides of a young man’s stomach crunched a little, and for the first time in what would be a lifetime of emotional hesitation reared its head in my belly that I would lead to the fact that I would be figured out. Jenny’s father entered, carrying a bowl of chips, “hey, how are you” with a quick glance, “you kids better watch this quick, me and the boy will be watching the game in a little bit. By the way,” looking me over again, “what have you got planned tonight?” “Well, I thought I would take your daughter back to the parsonage and fuck her brains out” was the first thing that I thought of but instead I replied, “maybe get a pizza or something, I don’t really know, I thought I would ask Jenny”, turning my head towards her for a rescue. “Sure, that sounds good, Bye mom, bye dad.” She said and pulled me out the door. “you don’t wanna talk to my dad too long, he loves to scare any boy that comes to my house.” I had no money for a date, in fact I only had about $7, five of which I had given to Chris Biester to buy a six pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon. “I thought we would go back to my house, hang out—listen to music.” Jenny thought this was a good idea. She was amazed at my record and tape collection. She had never seen so much music in anybody’s room. My brother Zoltan, home on leave was doing what most young mid-west American’s were doing on Christmas break were doing, getting loaded on a nightly basis. My stepfather was out, most likely at a support group meeting or in Columbus.

Jenny had never heard of much of the music I had, “Who is R.E.M.? Is that short for something? What is the Replacements? I have never heard any of this, oh wait, I know who the Beatles and The Rolling Stones are, you listen to them huh?” She scanned the wall of tapes, “how did you get so many of these, there must be at least a hundred.” Opening the first beer of the night, “Well, I love music, I got to DJ at the Wittenberg radio station for the past few years, so some I taped from them, some from my friends in Athens. You can pick whatever you want to.” Leaning into the wall of cassettes she would pull one out and without looking towards me, hand it over. “Wow, this is a lot. Who is Lou Reed and if he has so many records how come I’ve never heard of him?…..Oh, here play this, I love Pink Floyd and then play this” pushing a Cars tape into my hand. We stayed there in my room, drinking beer, eventually having our first kiss together and with the clumsiness that comes from teenage love, discovered one another’s body’s. When she pulled her top off, she wore an emerald green brassiere and later, to my astonishment, matching green panties which she refused to remove. By the end of the evening we were finishing each other’s sentences, laughing at how we had appeared to know one since birth but had only, tonight really talked to one another. The anxiety I had felt, slipped away, replaced by an inner confidence that, somehow, this is the way things were supposed to be and I was ok with this. The snow covered the car as we left the house, it was nearly ten o’clock and Christmas was just a few days away. Praying for the car to start, the key turned in the ignition, it seemed to have a gasp while groaning, “it had better start, my dad would kill me if he knew we came back to your house.” A deep breath seemed to do the trick, as the ignition turned again, and in some manner looked to have winked at me and came to a shuddering start. The exhaust convulsed with black smoke, the caused us to laugh nervously, and we roared out of the driveway into the twirling snow.

Two days later on Christmas Eve, as we sat in hard wooden pew while Midnight Christmas Services went on, we exchanged notes. Holding sweating hands, one said, “only two days.” It had felt like forever and at the same time as if the future was complete in our twitchy arms.

Below: Jenny playing for only the second time in 14 years, nearly 27 years to the day of that first date. (thanks to Shirley Tobias for the video)

Jerry Wick & Jenny Mae part 49: Thinking 1985/2012

Thinking. 1985/2012

Weaving through traffic, driving the first new car I ever bought on my own at the age of 40, music blaring as I sing along as if I am in a bullet traveling 45 miles an hour through downtown Columbus. The songs reach back to childhood (Springsteen, Rolling Stones, Woody Guthrie) to my twenties, (New Bomb Turks, Superchunk, Sinead O’Conner, Dinosaur Jr, Matador Records) and then into the present, (Allo Darlin, Sea Lions, Luke Roberts), giving me moments of elsewhere while waiting for a mini-van to get the fuck out of the way. Watching pedestrians as they bustle with bags and briefcases across steamy downtown streets, all the seriousness that a suit can imply, stuck on faces that look straight ahead; no doubt they are thinking of jobs to be done. In the car, contemplating visions of the past while guitars blast into my ears, I invariably think of a father long gone–a man who choose to vacate his family years ago, I think of Jerry, who is always just a flicker of thought and finally of Jenny and what her life is like these days.

Bruno shouts from the back seat, “daddy, punk rock, daddy, punk rock” , leaning down I skip from a Puccini aria to the Dogmatics, and he is pleased. One day, he may have the faint impression of a memory, sitting in the back seat as his father dodges slow cars, singing along to the soundtrack of Bruno’s childhood. I feel alone. Sensing that all the other inhabitants feel the same as I do, constrained to their bodies, thoughts limited to their own experiences, yearning to feel together if not for just a moment. But with the knowing of the isolation that rises again, the feeling that not only intercourse can relieve because the moments after intercourse are a reminder that yet, again, we are all alone.

It’s a science fiction experiment, these bodies of our, like tiny droplets of rain, hurtling towards the soil until our souls splash and explode against the concrete and dirt of our lives. Swallowed by the force of the ground. It is the music that keeps the feeling of life while sitting in the white Volkswagen with a boy in the backseat, shouting above the din, “daddy, more guitars, daddy, louder.”

The phone rings, yet another example of science fiction come to fruition, “hey, just want you to know, I’m still alive.” It’s Jenny, in the hospital again. “shit is crazy over here,” she explains, her voice muffled from the sheer tiredness of life, “but they can’t kill ole Jenny.” She has the memory of an elephant, at moments she is able to conjure a piece of the past that, even if I were there I would doubt that it would happen, some of it so surreal and outstanding that I scarcely believe that it happened. “I was thinking of that one time we had that New Year’s Eve party in that hotel in Springfield with your brother and all his fucked up friends. Remember?” Searching the moldiest canals of my mind, past exams I took, under papers I wrote, children saying the most fucked up shit, I bump into the memory, sheltered away some twenty-seven years ago. “Um, yeah sorta.” “Remember, you and I went and fucked in that broom closet and then went back to the party . We paid that security guard $20 to pretend he was arresting Donny Acuff, and then the guy got fired and ended up back at the parsonage partying with us all night. And what’s her face killed Russ, your goldfish? Boy, you told that bitch off.” Pulling into the parking garage, I try to balance the memory with the idea that part of my job is to advise treatment, justice and compassion in court today. “er, yeah, I remember that, but I can’t really think about that right now.” “That shit was funny. Anyway, I’m doing ok, trying to figure out how to get my legs working, and I failed my HUD inspection.” Jerking to attention on this last note, “What, how can you fail a HUD inspection when you are in a nursing home and have been in the hospital for two weeks?” I ask, flabbergasted that some moron at the Columbus Metropolitan Housing Authority would do such a thing. “Do they know you are in a nursing home?” “Yup, of course they know. They said I still had to do it, so I called a friend to go over there. Everything has to be fixed within ten days or I will lose my Section 8 voucher. But my friend said he’ll fix it.” Thinking to myself, the same friend who beat the shit out of you last month.

“Find out who your worker is over there and I’ll send a letter over and make a few phone calls.” There is a pause, “I don’t know who it is, all my paperwork is at the apartment and I can’t leave here, fuck, I can’t walk.” blowing an air of frustration, with cheeks in full puffed mode, I answer, “Ok, I’ll find out.”

Being poor is not easy, especially in America where people tend to be shuttled between bureaucratic paths that resemble something between a Kafka story and the story of the little girl who feel down the well, at times frustratingly sad but also bold in the ironic malice of workers whose job it is to guard the most basic rights of the poor. I see this on a daily basis, the vilification of the poor and mentally ill, as if those who are blessed with opportunities had in some astral manner, earned these opportunities. The belief that being born into opportunity gives someone the license to dis-empower the powerless.

Every state in the Union has its own laws and guidelines for social workers, counselors and outreach workers, with some states requiring a four year college degree plus the passing of a licensure test to practice the art of helping. Others, have laws that have a minimal requirement, with any four or two year degree sufficing in allowing, someone, usually with good intentions to work with the poor, mentally ill, homeless and addicted. Sadly, in the midst of slogans, uninformed opinions, we, collectively wage war on the underclass as if brandishing their shortcomings in front of them, we will somehow protect our own. Draconian voting laws, every form of stereotype, whether under the guise of patriotism, religion and or capitalism is used as a weapon to keep ourselves from looking at what is barely ours. A fragile shell that is protected by the opportunities that most of us are born into. It is a skinny path we walk, one filled with dangers that can dart suddenly from the underbrush of our lives, in the form of an accident, cancer, job loss, addiction or mental illness. I choose to do what I do as a way to relieve my own guilt for the underprivileged and at times, I do it with a chip on my shoulder, as I have no use for the shaming of the people I choose to serve. I am blunt with the truth as it is the only way I can make sense of the suffering I see, perhaps, I do it to make sense of  the confusion I was brought up with or maybe it is a calling.

There was a large farm next abutted next to the tiny chuck of yard where the tiny ranch house stood, a house that resembled one of millions in America, this one set right of the old National Highway. Three small bedrooms and an unfinished basement where Jenny and her younger sister slept, a piece of 1970′s frayed green carpet kept bare teenage feet from slapping against the concrete. Upstairs their little brother Tony slept in the same room with another younger sister, Megan and down a “hallway” that consisted of two medium steps from the closet sized bathroom was the parents room. This was the third house the family had lived in over the past four years, all of them less than a mile apart. The farm behind and next to them was abandon, the silo standing as a white beacon of failure to every passerby. This was the mid-eighties when the scorched-earth polices of Reagan capitalism cindered many a family farm, but the workings of these policies were cloaked in the feel good speech of an old actor who while robbing the heartland blind made us all feel a little safer. Jenny and her siblings each raised a lamb for the annual Clark County Fair, active members of 4-H, they realized the fragile lesson of life, death and the meaning of the cycle of hardship. The sheep would be slaughtered after the fair, and hopefully each child would be able to sell the animal for a good price, money to be invested in college, a car or to help the family out.

After school, we would climb into my tarnished Ford Mustang, bits of it chipped at the bottom with bucket seats that sat so low to the ground you could swear you could feel the heat of the asphalt under your ass. She would run the sheep, who by nature are not the brightest animals, trying to get them in shape to tone the muscles that would soon be ripped from bone and consumed. The animals would stare at her dumbfounded as if she were an alien, they had no reason to run in circles, besides they thought, “it’s hot and we are wearing wool for christsakes!” I would laugh at her efforts, drinking sun-tea while her mother shook her head, “it looks silly, I know, but she wins every year.” This was true Jenny won a lot of contests, her intelligence hidden by her quick wit and outrageousness. She won first place in the State of Ohio Soil Judging Contest sponsored by the Future Farmers of America, as a junior in high school although she was neither a  farmer presently or in the future. She twice won the State of Ohio Wool Judging Contest sponsored by the FFA. She was in the National Honor Society and was warned by several teachers to be wary of me, due to my mischievous nature and poor grades although I came from a long line of professors and professionals.

We would walk the abandon farm, in the cold and the warmth of spring, trasping over withered husks of corn, clumps of dirt that remained unmoved season to season, the massive wooden doors of the farm remained locked, shackled together with a rusty thick chain. We tried in vain to get into the barn, with the simple reason to unhinge our teenage lust in the dark shadows and moistness of mildewing hay that was waiting for us behind the tethered doors. The raspy corn would crunch beneath our shoes, the wind would sail across the unproductive patch of earth that surrounded us into our chest, holding hands the questions of our adolescent minds abounded as if compelled by the chilly wind. She would explain things to me as we stepped over forgotten plants, pockets of dirt that remained upturned and why certain crops could grow in Ohio and how crop rotation works. This was all new to me, I had assumed through my lens of persecution that farming just involved listening to Hank Williams Jr while riding on a tractor and telling nigger jokes. Of being provincial and dismissive of outsiders, like myself, although it would take me nearly thirty-five years to come to terms that I was an outsider nearly everywhere I went, including, at times my own house. The lump of distaste and protection I had accumulated over four years in living in rural Ohio slowly melted during this time, and an understanding of the wisdom, care and struggles of my classmates and neighbors came into focus. As Jenny called me out on my class snobbishness, one that was rooted in a liberal sense politics, as we were by all accounts poor in a monetary sense, I felt more at ease in my surroundings.

Nestled in the dirt roughly 200 yards back from the farm, her own house a dot in the distance, we found the carcass of a cow. Almost complete, it’s bones, weathered white  and picked clean by birds, rodents, bugs and seasons, we crouched around it in awe. Who would let an animal die out in the field, let alone wouldn’t the animal be noticed? “How does this happen?” I asked, crouching down, examining a hip bone, half buried into the dirt, the white bone resembling a conch shell in the middle of Ohio. She pulled it out, clumps of dirt sticking to its side, it was too cold for any insects, “it’s weird, huh?” I took a few steps back, resting on my haunches, keeping my balance with my left hand I felt something hard in the dirt. There was another carcass and soon we noticed roughly four or five cow skeletons. It as if we had managed to slowly walk into a cave, and slowly brushed a beetle off our arm and noticed that there were thousands crawling around us. “Christ, look at all these fucking bones.” The sky was gray, with soft rolling clouds hanging above the earth as if they were licking their collective lips readying themselves to unleash a torrent of cold rain. A splash of lightening shattered in the distant. I looked at Jenny and she stared at me, a large thick raindrop exploded between us. Wind seemed to gurgle in our ears, and she tried to put the hip bone back where it had submerged, as if it were never disturbed. “I don’t know why anyone would let these poor animals die out here and never collect them”, she said more to herself than me.

Jenny Mae and Jerry Wick part 46: Guided by Voices, Part II-The Beatles, The Grifters, and Sparks

Guided by Voices, Part II: The Beatles, The Grifters, and Sparks

The house on Patterson looked good in every season, as it was constructed of bulky, brown, stained, wooden clapboard and had stony, raised gardens. In the winter it looked lonely and almost haunted, while in the summer the peeling brown clapboard was blistered by the sun, but in autumn the house was in it element. With its tarnished grass fading gray and brown and yellowing leaves bulging out of its overstuffed gutters, it could be a grimy wooden effigy or the loss that October seems to bring.

The days and nights shuddered and burped along. Every package we received at Used Kids came bearing gifts of sound, and the mail box on Patterson always seemed to contain some letter requesting music from Columbus. Time was as still as a television station that was always on but never watched. Nobody paid heed to it.

I had fallen hard for the sound of the Grifters, a band from Memphis that annihilated sound and built it back up with blasts of melodic sounds that were at once disquieting and soothing.  I had received their first full-length, So Happy Together, from Scat Records. I listened to it while working at Used Kids one morning, and by the third song I was on the phone with Robert Griffin, seeing if he could get me in contact with them. By the end of the afternoon I had booked them a show at Staches with Moviola and Gaunt.

Onstage, the Grifters were a shuddering, calculated, belching wreckage of sound. With a cloud of distorted guitars straining to stay out of tune and, in a spurt of electric coughing, the audio version of a halfback darting from the pile into open space, they would bend into a melody as breathtaking as a dive into a warm pool of water. They were, in a sense, a counter balance to Guided by Voices. Where GBV would inject a heavy dose of smiling hope into their minute-and-a-half epics, the Grifters were more concerned with the disappointment that tragedy brings, a sorrowful blend of noise and crankiness.

At that first Grifters show at Staches, there was hardly anyone there, only myself and a few patrons who had managed to pick up the band’s record at Used Kids. Jerry Wick was not yet too impressed with the Grifters, but the Ted Hattemer and the other fellows in Moviola were enamored of their sound. The Grifters took a step into the freedom of feedback and built something that was as extraordinary as a stone castle, a noisy blackened musical hook to hang yourself with.

The next morning over coffee in my dining room, I played some Guided by Voices for the Grifters, explaining that I thought they had a lot in common musically. It was apparent that Dave from the Grifters was every bit as much a music fan as Bob Pollard. We spent the morning playing records and talking music.  This listening together was a form of breaking bread, and the bond of kinship was born.

There is really nothing as a stranger asking, “What kind of music do you like?”

I always think that a good response would be, “I really like the idea of Anal Cunt, but I never really liked their sound,” or, “I really like the first Cars record because I got my first blow job to it, but after that they went completely and embarrassingly downhill.” There was a difference in the world I inhabited. It was common knowledge that we all obsessed over sound. The knowledge that the mechanism of sound could be used to transport a person somewhere else was the adhesive that held our community together.

Bob and the rest of Guided by Voices were making monthly visits to Columbus, usually to record with Mike Rep and drink beer with Ron House, Jim Shepard, Jerry and me. Shuffling into the store in the late afternoon, fresh from the hour drive from Dayton, they would arrive just in time for the five o’clock God-given right to a beer. Dan Dow once made the outrageous claim that getting stone drunk at work was not always a good idea. Ron replied, “Well Dan, that’s why we fought the fuckin’ revolution!” There was no argument from us—how could anyone dispute the constitutional right to happy hour? After sharing Rolling Rocks or vases of Budweiser at Larry’s or BW-3, Bob would huddle with Mike in the annex and mix and mash-up the tinny four-track recordings he had made. We talked music and sports mostly, because in Ohio there is really nothing else that matters. The weather is always gray, the economy is grayer, and politics is just a slick slope to traverse over beer..

One afternoon Bob asked me if I was familiar with Odyssey and Oracle, by the Zombies. “Yeah, I love it. It’s kinda like Odessa by the Bee Gees. In fact, it’s my girlfriend’s favorite record.”

“Do you have a copy?”

“Yeah, it’s not on CD yet. In fact, there’s only a crappy best of on CD. I actually think I have a first pressing as well as a Rhino re-issue. You can have the reissue or I’ll trade you something for the original.”  Bob offered to trade his copy of Slay Tracks, the first single by Pavement, which I gladly accepted.  We also talked about new bands we liked, especially the Grifters, whose tarnished, feedback-laden sound had made an impression on Bob.

He wondered aloud, “That’s what I’m trying to do, get that sound, but maybe my songs are too poppy.”

“Oh, you have to see them live. They pull all that noise off in person and it’s like watching a choreographed car wreck.”

Bob excitedly replied, “Lemme know when they play next and I’ll make sure GBV plays with them.”

Guided by Voices were playing in Columbus quite a bit. Dayton hadn’t embraced them  yet and they were not quite polished enough to get shows there, so they would come to Columbus and play with the Slave Apartments, V-3, Belreve, Gaunt, and Jenny. One of the most memorable shows they played around this time was when they opened for  V-3 and the Dutch noise band The Ex.

Roughly a month or so later, Flower Booking called me and asked if I would be willing to book another Grifters show. Although I had already brought them to Columbus several times, losing a pocketful of money on every occasion, I gladly accepted. By now Jerry had become a fan, mostly on the basis of their single “She Blows Blasts of Static”, a song of epic, noisy wreckage that pulled you in and then pummeled you with leathery hooks before offering release, so Gaunt was on the bill. I phoned Bob, who said that because it was on a week night not everyone could get off of work to play the show, but he would come up anyway. During the show, Bob, Jerry, and I were just to the left of the stage. As the Grifters plied their splintered sound in front of thirty or so souls, Bob turned to me and Jerry and yelled, “The three best bands ever: the Beatles, The Grifters, and Sparks!” Jerry and I would repeat this often to one another, nodding our head with laughter at our own inside joke. “The Beatles, the Grifters, and Sparks!” Indeed.

Bob wearing a Used Kids t-shirt on this early video

no Jenny Mae on youtube:

go.

Jerry Wick and Jenny Mae pt 43: Alcoholism part I (93-94)

Alcoholism, part one:

The small wooden house sat just off the curb on Patterson Avenue. It was in the shape of an “L” and an old woman had lived and passed on in the house just a few years prior to me and Tom Hamrick moving in. The garden was filled with perennial flowers jutting up through stone cracks and raised flowerbeds that the old woman had no doubt carefully designed and plotted over the years. The yard, even after the apathy of the former renters, was brilliant in the spring, especially in contrast with the house’s flaking paint—bits of white and brown rolling in oblong tunnels as the summer and winters of Ohio did their damage. It was as if the mums, tulips, and roses had their own steely resolve and sprouted up in spite of the crumbling house. There was a destroyed picket fence alongside the rear portion of the yard that marked it as a truly private, although there was a small house in the back. The house had several tenants during my four years on Patterson, but none that ever invited me inside.

Tom’s bedroom was smaller than mine, really just enough to hold his bed and a tiny dresser. My bedroom had a row of bookshelves and a wooden desk given to me by my uncle Pablo, who had pulled it from a pile of rubbish in the sixties and refinished it. I had a tiny Apple computer given to me by Ted Hattemer as well as a typewriter with which I wrote a great deal of poetry and made some stabs at fiction.  I named one of these fictional stories “Napoleon Trees” and gave it to my first wife as a Christmas present. I did not keep a copy of it and can’t recall what it was about. My bedroom was that of an aspiring drunkard. I rarely washed the sheets, which were covered in dog hair, sweat, various body fluids, and the stale scent of alcohol.

Drinking was a way to connect not just to others but to myself; an avenue of discourse into the subtleties of a mind that refused to turn off and was always working. Alcohol allowed the laughter to flow and this, in turn, presented the opportunity to make people smile. The validation of laughter is one of the finest feelings a person can have, for joy is brief in most of our lives—a small jolt of pleasure in a desert of the mundane. Jerry, Jenny, and I were all gifted with the ability to wriggle smiles out of others. Jenny and Jerry, in spite of the darkness that crept around their edges, were two of the funniest people I have ever encountered. They had an ability to see the preposterousness of life, to cultivate the absurd and bring it into focus. Of course, laughter went hand-in-hand with drinking. Laughing at ghosts, indeed.

After starting to drink again in 1991, there was no turning back. At first I was hesitant and fearful of the drink, as if I were going to receive an electric shock from picking up the bottle, but after slowly nursing a few Jim Beam and waters the fear dispersed, climbing back to some hidden cavern of my psyche only to return with a subtle vengeance some eight years later. Drinking was pleasurable and comfortable most of the time, my mind sinking into an ethereal lazy-boy recliner, with the sweet scents of whiskey, water, and tobacco serving as a soft throw-blanket over my being. At other times there was the ugliness in the booze, nights when I was so frightened to go home alone that I would wait at the bar as the bartender slowly cleaned up, rising from the stool only when I knew I was only minutes from slumber. I had the drunken timing of a professional. Bars were essential in the formulation of our lives, not only for the alcohol that provided the fuel for sociability but more importantly for providing opportunities for the bizarre and unrehearsed.

Companionship was always welcome, and the fear of going home alone gripped nearly everyone, man and woman alike, at 2:30 A.M. Nobody was spared the trepidation of lying in bed alone while the bar emptied out onto the gray and at times shivering sidewalks of Columbus. It was as if sleep was just a fly’s wing away from death, and the warm body of a lover would provide both carnal sensations and, but more importantly, the vulnerable secrets of acceptance that only love making can bring. By the same degree, though, there was the fear of the next morning—the lurching headaches, the awkward nervousness of shaky good mornings, and the thoughts of the coming responsibilities of the day.

I had a lover with red hair, a nose ring, and a slender build during this time. We were wary of one another. Usually she would come over in the early evening, we would make love, and she would leave. It was a regular ritual for us, it was oddly normal, although in hindsight one could reckon that the only normalcy in each of us was emotional abnormality. She had no interest in seeing me get drunk and was one of the first women to tell me this. She said I acted “silly” when I drank, which annoyed me to no end as I always thought that the word “silly” is, well, silly itself. And stupid. She also was fond of the word “zany” which may have doomed the relationship from the outset. Only on a handful of occasions did we spend an entire night together, and this was fine for both of us. We had very little in common with the exception that we enjoyed each other’s bodies and hated being alone. The first time she came into my room, she glanced down at my hairy bed, with sheets that held countless drunken stories between the faded and frayed white fabric, and over to the side of the bed. Next to a stack of books that I would never be able to digest during my inebriated nights sat my brown bucket. “What is that?” she asked, staring at me with eyebrows askew.

“My bucket, in case I vomit.”

Still staring, she asked, “Why? Are you sick?”

“Nope, I just usually throw up around three o’clock most nights,” I answered, taking a long pull off my Black Label.

“Oh.”

During the spring and summer of 1994, it wasn’t uncommon for me to vomit into the bucket three to four nights a week. I was also prone to brownouts, which are PG rated black-outs, and one time I woke up on my roof. When the room would spin, I liked to go outdoors and stare at the sky. Somehow the largeness of the heavens would calm the rattling of my stomach and soothe the civil war that was tearing apart my innards. A secret hope of mine was to venture into the celestial sphere when I passed on, to taste the violent beauty of space. At four A.M. I would think about this and how my inner world tumbled upside down. Amazingly enough, I hardly gained any weight, and I didn’t experience much of the surliness of so many alcoholics. I continued to live a blessed life, one that allowed me many opportunities to explore the world that I cared so much about, music, people, and more music. But I couldn’t imagine any of it without the help of alcohol.

Jerry Wick & Jenny Mae part 41: Prostrate 1991

Prostate: 1991.

Days are sometimes stitched together with absurdity. One moment jells into another, morphing one’s experience into a long line of episodes that span the gamut, from unrestrained joy to the tyranny of utter depression, sometimes within only a few hours. In the mid-nineties, I was living in a small house on Patterson Avenue. It had barely two bedrooms and one large living area in the front of the house, a front porch area that was sheltered, and another small room off the kitchen that worked more as an overfed hallway that was stuffed with shelves of records and my makeshift stereo. It was pieced together with old bits of electronic gear that I had collected over the years. The only newer item was a dual cassette player that I had bought with a Sears credit card. The house, which was small and wooden and had a deteriorating garden that a recently deceased elderly woman had spent years planting, was home to many of the nonsensical events of my mid-twenties. It was a motel of sorts for bands traveling through Columbus, and my roommate Tom, a jovial bearded sort who sported a tattoo of Don Shula on one arm and one of Don Knotts on the other, was shellacked with many late night shenanigans as he tried to get enough sleep so he could get to his five A.M. job as a designer at Kinko’s. The living room had two couches. One was a threadbare relic from the early seventies that my grandmother had given me after my grandfather passed away and the other was an orange vinyl sort that was deathly cold in the winter but easy to wipe off.

These couches and the floor around the stereo made quite a comfortable space for many traveling bands during those years. Some were kind of known and some lesser so to most, with the exception of those of us who breathed music the way others focused on such things as family, jobs, and religion. Bands with names like Sleepyhead, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, The Ex, and Nothing Painted Blue would make nary a ripple for most of the people I used to know, while others, such as Jon Spencer, Chavez, Guided by Voices, and The Breeders, may have garnered a raised eyebrow from a family member. This was my life, though, and I embraced it as if the certainty of my existence depended on it.

One of the bands staying one night witnessed one of those absurd situations that many of us often found ourselves in. The band was from Boston. They called themselves Kudgel and dubbed the genre of music they played “lard rock” due to the hefty girth of the band members. They had one stupendous song called the “Alphabet Song” and a new record called Chimp Rock. Although they were from Boston, they lacked the brainy pop eagerness of other Northeast bands like the Blake Babies, the Lemonheads, and Sebadoh. They were more akin to the sludgy sounds emanating from the Amphetamine Reptile label in Minneapolis. Kudgel were pure hate rock but in a very goofy way, as half the band dressed in skirts and muumuus. The shared a bill with the Bassholes and the Cheater Slicks, who were also from Boston and whose immense guitars sounded as if they were belched from the bowels of the Atlantic during one of those fabled New England Northeasterners that could erupt out of thin air and bring the death of a thousand shipping vessels.

Jenny lived just a few blocks from me in the crammed apartment I had left a few years before, complete with most of the belongings that we had accumulated during our stormy and hesitant four-year relationship—several pianos, pieces of broken stereo equipment, half-finished artworks, hundreds of painted doilies that Jenny would churn out during her fits of mania, and a boundless array of women’s clothing that spanned the last fifty years of the 20^th century. Sometimes when I visited her we would argue and throw verbal shots at one another, blaming each other for the misery of our lives, never taking a modicum of responsibility for our own sadness until I would crack under her spell and apologize as if I were just convicted on manslaughter. Other times, we would inevitably have ruinous ex-sex, humping our bodies together for a brief period to help squelch the past or the present or whatever longing needed to be squelched. This would always followed by a promise that we were not going to get back together again as I left her house as soon as it was appropriate to do so. We were both seeing other people during this time, and as navigating one’s twenties is difficult enough, there were no thoughts that this constituted unfaithfulness on our parts.

I had some issues with my bodily plumbing around this time. I had gotten an STD from a former girlfriend and had to go to the Health Department to take care of it, as I was too ashamed to go to good old Dr. Brown. D r. Brown was in his early forties and had a family clinic just on the outskirts of campus in an old wooden house that straddled Pearl Alley and a gas station. He had an easy going charm about him, with the kind of good natured easiness that he must have gained by going through medical school in the nineteen seventies.. There was no possible way I could have him, with his Mickey Mouse earring and bushy mustache, look me in the eye while sticking an antiseptic, 8” cotton swab down the shaft of my penis. When I had some new symptoms, I realized that I needed to go back to the Health Department. I assumed that most people who would be foolish enough to acquire a sexually transmitted disease would be late risers, so I made a point of arriving early to have the symptoms that had been bothering me treated.

The Columbus Health Department provides tests for the standard line of sexually transmitted diseases: gonorrhea, Chlamydia, and syphilis. The agency will immediately disperse medication if someone has symptoms of a sexually transmitted disease even before the results are returned. These symptoms range from pus and discharge to itchiness. I was experiencing two of these. During the first two visits out of three, I was given antibiotics and told that I would have to refrain from alcohol for the duration of the medication, which was roughly ten days. I could not abide for even two days. On my third visit, I was the first to arrive at the Health Department. I sat in the corner, filled with bewilderment and shame. I had refrained from having sex during the month and was perplexed. Soon after sitting down and flipping through a wrinkled copy of a years old Sports Illustrated, I noticed another man sitting across from me. He was roughly my age and seemed slightly familiar. Soon my name was called and I took my chart to the desk. Entering the back room, I was met with a heavyset African-American nurse who gazed at me and shook her head. “Weren’t you just here?” she muttered more to herself than me. “Well, you know the drill,” and before my pants got to my knees she had jabbed the long swab up into me, shaking her head the entire time.

For an alcoholic, taking antibiotics while refraining from drinking is about as easy as eating one potato chip. After my symptoms didn’t go away after my three visits to the Health Department, I resigned myself to seeing good old Dr. Brown, with his Mickey Mouse earring and his undoubtedly disappointed mustache. I told him that I had an STD. I figured a good shot of penicillin would do the trick. Shortly before my visit to Dr. Brown, Jenny phoned. “Hey, you got the clap again, huh?” she asked.

“Shut up. If I got anything it was from you and your vagina that welcomes anybody who asks.”

She laughed, “My new boyfriend saw you there the other day. You guys were the only ones there and you both fucked me.”

“Yeah, that’s real funny, Jenny. Real fucking funny.”

I went in to Dr. Brown’s office, surrounded by Highlights for Children and Ranger Rick magazines, my dick itching as if an ant had crawled up it. I went back to see Dr. Brown, who had been treating me and my variety of drunken escapades for a few years, and told him what was going on. He laughed when I informed him of the three trips to the VD clinic. Looking at me with a face of bafflement, he said, “You probably don’t have one at all,” explaining that the symptoms would have worsened and, besides, the medication would have killed whatever I had. He asked if I had ever gotten my results.

I sheepishly said, “No, its kinda humiliating calling there.” He then asked me to drop my pants and said he was going to check my prostrate.

Leaning over, I was startled to hear good old Dr. Brown shout out, “Good heavens, son, no wonder you are so uncomfortable. Your prostate is huge. Christ, it feels like you’re sixty five years old.”

Pulling up my trousers, trying to look dignified with an enlarged prostrate and jelly all over my ass, I asked, “So that means I don’t have an STD, right? That’s good.”

The good doctor’s brow furrowed as he shook his head. “No, it is not good for a twenty-two-year-old man to have a prostrate that large. It can only mean two things—it is severely infected or you have cancer.”

I was dumbfounded. Cancer? On my fuel injector? I asked, “So now what?” Dr. Brown made an appointment with a specialist right away. I would only have to wait two weeks. Needless to say, there was a great deal of alcohol consumption during those next  two weeks. I was relieved that I didn’t have any communicable diseases, thus saving me from the embarrassment of informing someone that they might have to get checked. I believed that I had cancer. Besides that, I lost at everything. I knew that I would never be a cancer survivor.

Kugdel arrived at my house sometime before my appointment with the specialist. I was smashed, ears blown by the Cheater Slicks and the goofy throat-rattling lard rock of Kudgel. Laughing as I fetched blankets and a trusty bucket that was kept bedside to make puking more convenient, the gentlemen from Boston were shown to the various beds in the house. Soon, Mark Erody, the erstwhile singer of Kudgel, walked into the living room holding a medical enema. “What the hell is this?!” he cackled.

“Oh, shit, I gotta be at the urologist in four hours and I have to give myself an enema.”

“An enema?”

“Uh huh, they think I might have prostate cancer.” News like that will suck any humorous energy out of a room, no matter how late at night.

“Oh wow, I’m so sorry to hear that, Bela.” The men all provided appropriately forlorn looks.

“It’s fine, and really I’m cool with it. I won’t wake you guys.” With that, I shuffled off to bed, bucket in hand.

The next morning, still drunk and struggling to decipher the small print of the instructions for the enema as I got on all fours, bare ass sticking towards the heavens, I had no idea what to do. My head throbbed and my hands were shaky from the morning shakes I would occasionally have. I figured, how hard it could be to stick something up one’s ass? Apparently, being half-drunk, hung-over, and experiencing more shakes than a 1970s Tudor Electronic Football game can make this an extraordinary endeavor. The first attempt caused a small bloody cut where I had never believed a cut was possible, and I wondered what it would feel like when I had to have a shot there. Standing up, I had half a mind to go ask one of the gentlemen from Kudgel to assist me, but thought better of it and plunged the small tube in. Soon enough, I was out the door, my ego low as I headed to the doctor. Checking in, I was informed that my appointment wasn’t for another week. I laughed as I informed my friend Gretchen, who had driven me, that I got the date wrong.

“You mean you gave yourself an enema for nothing?”

“Yup, isn’t that hilarious?” The men from Kudgel also thought it was funny when I returned.

Seven days later, I arrived at the urologist office with two weeks of heavy drinking and worries stacked up like a line of bottles on the bar, peeled labels and sticky glass. I was a mess. The urologist was a shaky old man who asked me to bend over while he checked out the canyon-sized prostrate that sat inside of me. The appointment was early in the morning. I was a bit groggy and still a bit drunk from the night before. I was so dehydrated that a lizard would have felt quite at home amongst my innards. The old man asked me to bend over even more, and I felt him struggling to get to that prostrate.

“Fuck,” I thought, “what the hell is he doing back there?” He asked me to turn around and, taking my sheepish penis in his hands, he checked to see if there was any discharge coming out.

He looked me in the eye and said, “You smell of alcohol. This may take a little longer.” Leaning again across the table, I felt him try to push something out of the wasteland that was my insides. Soon, my knees grew weak, and I felt stars dancing around my head as if I were being squelched by every force known to man.

“Uhh, I don’t feel to good,” I groaned as I rolled off the side of the tiny urologist bed. The old man caught me and slid a chair under me. This was the worst.

The urologist produced a small packet of smelling salts. In a calming voice he stated, “Doesn’t matter, happens to the best of them.” There was a “best” of people who had their prostates squeezed and poked? Waking from the faint, I looked down as he grabbed my pathetic, droopy penis and wrestled a smidgen of moisture out of it as if he were squeezing the last drop of toothpaste from the tube. “That should do it. Before you leave, the nurse will give you something to put your ejaculate in.”

At times, reality is much more far-fetched than any concoction a mind can make up. Pulling up the trousers that had sunk like a cordless flag to my feet, nestled around my ankles in utter defeat, I murmured a “thank you” to the aging physician. I felt the damp jelly that he had used soak into my underwear as my hangover dissipated into the wild morning. Walking through the waiting room with a slightly modified drunkard’s gait, several thoughts came to mind. First, had I heard the old doctor correctly, that I would have to dispense sperm this morning after the ordeal that I had just gone through? How was this done, exactly? It occurred to me, as I passed elderly men hunched next to concerned white-haired wives who were holding their hands and rubbing their shoulders, that somehow my life had turned into a living, swirling, and debilitating clusterfuck.

I asked the small mousy woman who combed her bangs forward with just the right amount of hair spray to look as if she could be auditioning for a part in a John Hughes movie what I needed to do. “Er, I think the doctor wants something else.”

She smiled, “Oh, he must want a stool sample.”

Somehow, in a matter of just a few seconds, the situation had gotten more absurd. I leaned forward, poking my head slightly through the opaque glass window the framed her 1982 haircut. “Hmm, no,” I whispered, “he wants something else.”

Her face crinkling, eye brows arched, she replied, “Really, I wonder what that could be?” Swiveling around in her chair, she bellowed to a nurse who was in some mysterious back room that all doctor’s offices seem to have. “Missy?! What else did the doctor want for Mr. Koe-Krompecher?!”

I noticed a head poke around a doorway in the back. “He needs a sperm sample from Mr. Koe-Krompecher!” the nurse brayed from the back. I turned around, hopeful that none of the grandmothers sitting next to the grandfathers who littered the waiting room like cows staring blankly in a field would have heard the words so ineloquently yelped from the back. I noticed a flock of mildly amused and curious smiles staring back at me.

“Oh, that’s easy to do,” said the mousy woman with the bangs. “I’ll have to get you a sample cup for you to put your ejaculate in.” Any sense of pride may have been tethered to my flailing and tattered being had just been torn and let to drift into a sea of humiliation at that moment. Completely confounded by the nonsensical situation I had found myself in, I stared up at the ceiling while I waited, a series of thoughts flashed through my mind. What sort of cup would this be?  Would they give me a room? Were there any sort of “tools” used to help facilitate the process?

The woman reappeared with a small plastic cup. “Hmmmm, interesting,” I thought to myself as she handed me the cup. Holding it in my hand, I noticed that it had a small label wrapped around it with small typed print that included my name, address, phone number, patient number, and the purpose of the cup. I grinned flatly, rocked back up on my heels, and stared at her. Seconds ticked by as she smiled back and nodded. A few more seconds passed. “Er, mmmm, so?” I inquired.

Red  bloomed across  her cheeks as if a curtain had closed over her face, eyes widened so far that they almost reached those combed down bangs. “Ohhhhhh,” she mouthed, answering the unasked question, “no, you need to bring it back in sometime in the coming week.”

“Great, thanks.” And with that I left.

Returning a week later with the small container, I hesitantly walked into the doctor’s office. The collection of old men with brave wives appeared not to have moved since my last visit. Smiling with trepidation, I rang the small metallic bell, inadvertently calling attention to myself. Ms. Bangs appeared, smiling the same vacant smile she had a week before. With pun intended, I handed her the plastic vessel containing a bit of my organic constitution and said, “I’ve come to drop this off for the doctor.”

Her eyebrows rose again. “Oh yes, of course? and what is it again?” she asked while spinning the tiny bottle in her hand. With another silently mouthed “Ohhh,” she nodded knowingly at me. “Oookayy, we will get back to you as soon as we get the results.”

The next week went by slowly. I was a man with too much on his mind looking for evening escape from the fear of the unknown. The fear was only placated by the sound of music, the consumption of beer, and the touch of another human being. Sitting in a back corner booth of Larry’s with small bottled candles burning into the smoke-filled air, peeling the labels off of beer bottles was a hobby unto itself. I plied for relief. Doom was about and I gabbed my fearful information to anyone who I thought could delay the loneliness of a dying man. Drawing comfort from the familiar, I managed to procure several different lovers in between dropping the seed of the Krompecher family for the doctor to read and hearing my fate. I thought that it was appropriate that, as my life circled the drain of death, I would not be alone.

Entering the doctor’s office nearly two weeks later, the apprehension was muggy in my mind as I prepared to receive the news of my demise. My breath was decaying as the cancer ate me from within, slowly from the loins up. There would be some justice in this, I presumed. I waited in the small, cramped, white-covered examination room. Staring blankly at graphic medical posters of the penis and urinary tract of a man, I was ready.

The old doctor entered, asked me how I was, and startled me with his first question. “Young man, how much alcohol do you drink every week?” He leaned towards me, clipboard held tightly to his chest as if he were protecting his chest from the arrows of denial.

“Oh, a few beers here and there,” I said as innocently as I could.

“Well, maybe, but it appears as if your prostate is infected and may be allergic to alcohol and maybe caffeine. We know that when the prostate is infected—we call that prostatitus, and you appear to have a severe case—alcohol and caffeine exacerbate the situation. My advice to you is to give up drinking alcohol or slow down or you will continue to have these problems.”

“That’s it?” I thought, “no cancer, just quit drinking?” I didn’t know what was worse.  Looking up at him, I asked, “So, you’re saying I don’t have cancer?”

“Yes, you don’t. You drink too much. You need to stop.” And with that he left the room.  With a great deal of relief, I left his office, smiling to myself. It would take me another twelve years to decide to quit drinking.

Jenny Mae & Jerry Wick part 39: Matador at 21

Matador at 21

Standing on the shoulders of the past is a dangerous position gazing through the haze of dead bodies, former lovers, and the highs and lows of the past can provided a remedy for today. 1989-1990 were years of planting seeds, at least for the soft underbelly of the fermenting underground scene. At night we huddled in bars, clutching long-necks as if they were talismans, eyeing bands on crumbling stages while looking for lovers through the haze of cigarette smoke. Back then we got paid to listen to records and laugh at the responsibilities of the rest of the world. Very few of us had children, had jobs that required button-down shirt or, god forbid had mortgage payments to make. The thirst inside of us was for music, booze, and the sense of belonging that those two ingredients can provide.

The grotesque hierarchy of major labels and commercial entities tried to foist the sickening, barbaric, and sexually destructive machismo of such drivel as Warrant, Motley Crue, and other purveyors of all things hair, spandex, and stupidity on us. The underground scene was more approachable, and although Dinosaur Jr. may have lacked the audio sheen of “Girls Girls Girls”, the guitar solo from “Freak Scene” ferociously laid waste to the whole ridiculous genre of 80s corporate rock, and Dinosaur Jr.’s song was more honest about relationships than anything Vince Neil and his skinny dumbfuck drummer could ever hope to aspire to. We discovered that those who made the most precious, moving art were among us, just a phone call or, better yet, a 7-inch away.

At Used Kids, we were connected to the loose but sophisticated network of labels, booking agents, fanzine writers, and fans across the country. There were only a few distributors getting the music into people’s hands. The labels were started in living rooms and some, by sheer force of personality, perseverance, and hard work, lifted themselves out of those living rooms and into real offices with fax machines, computers, and maybe even a Starburst commercial or two. It’s ironic that now, twenty years after the static indie/grunge rock revolution, many labels are again being run out of living rooms, coffee shops, or wherever one’s laptop may be. Because of the kind but acerbic enthusiasm of Ron House and Dan Dow, whose reputations preceded them, I got to know most every important player in nineties underground rock. A tiny touchstone in the largest college town in America, soon I was handling the ordering at Used Kids, and I started booking shows into the cozy confines of Staches and Bernie’s. My own enthusiasm was exhausting—records were more important than anything. more important than sex because a record can’t hurt you, more important than jobs because songs don’t have responsibilities, and more important than families because music can’t leave you.

Gerard Cosloy phoned Used Kids one day and asked Ron to order the first full-length record on his new label, Matador Records. My memory is clouded because I thought it was Teenage Fanclub’s A Catholic Education, but it must have been Superchunk’s self-titled debut. In any event, we ordered a handful and were blown away by both records, especially the life-affirming sound of Superchunk’s “My Noise” and “Slack Motherfucker,” the sentiments of which laid the groundwork for an entire generation soon to be labeled Gen-Xers. A Catholic Education was itself an epiphany, combining the raggedness of Sonic Youth with the fragility of Dinosaur Jr. (two bands that Gerard had worked closely with at Homestead Records). Teenage Fanclub’s record was beautiful in every staticky, disordered note, a watershed of sound coalescing into what may be described simply as Perfect Sound Forever.

We ordered direct from most labels; Scat in Cleveland, Dischord in Washington, DC, Ajax in Chicago, Siltbreeze in Philadelphia, Sub Pop in Seattle, and Revolver in San Francisco. All of them were run by people with the same devotion to musical escape that we shared. It wasn’t too long before I was working closely with the labels as bands played and sweated through the college towns and major cities across America. Bands and label employees knew that they could find ears and couches in Columbus, and it wasn’t long before Columbus had become a main stop for touring bands. I discovered that every town had someone like me who was all too willing to shell out meager guarantees to musicians who were escaping their own mundane jobs for two weeks to eat greasy eggs and falafel and snuggle up to a stranger’s dog. I got to know some of these folks myself, either closely or by the casual association of the scene. In Athens, Georgia, Henry Owings booked shows and was soon putting out the devastatingly funny Chunklet zine that lampooned our entire tiny universe. In Pittsburgh, a curly haired, overtly serious short man named Manny brought bands in by the dozens. In Cleveland, Kathy Simkoff eked out a living finding bands to fill her small club, the Grog Shop, with many of the same bands who would wake up at eleven A.M. on my floor and make the two-and-half-hour drive to Cleveland.

I had only two unpleasant interactions with bands over the years, both involving bands that I booked as favors for their labels. The first was H.P. Zinker, who managed to have the debut releases for both Matador and Thrill Jockey Records. I had gotten a last minute show for them at Bernie’s on a Monday night with Gaunt, who had just “signed” with Thrill Jockey. There were all of six people at the show—me, Gaunt, and one rabid, blonde-haired fan who stood in front of H.P. Zinker for their entire set. The drummer also played in the Amherst band Gobblehoof (for whom J. Mascis moonlighted on drums) and he was a bit irate that I didn’t have more than the fifty bucks I gave him out of my pocket. He threatened to take me outside and “kick my skinny little ass.” At that point in my life, I was sober—a quiet, peaceful record store guy whose only aspiration was to listen to the next Ass Ponys record. There were to be no fights that night, although I did not offer my couch or to introduce them to my lovable dogs.

The second unpleasant interaction was with Moonshake, an English band signed to the brilliant Too Pure label. They lacked the frenetic genius of label mates Th’ Faith Healers and Stereolab, and leader Dave Callahan and songstress Margaret Fielder didn’t have the charm and politeness of those bands. After receiving a call from the Matador offices asking for a last minute show for Moonshake as they came from Chicago to New York for the annual College Music Journal Marathon, I placed them on a bill with three noisy, garagey bands on Thrill Jockey: Zipgun and Gorilla were from Seattle (Gorilla had released a brilliant song called “Detox Man”) and, of course, Gaunt.  Moonshake didn’t like the fact that they had to go on second nor did they approve of the garage drunkenness of the other bands. Several times during the night, Margaret complained to me about the order of bands and the sounds of the bands.  At the end of the night, after splitting the modest door four ways, each band made roughly $150 (with the exception of Gaunt, who usually played for free on the shows I booked). Needless to say, Margaret was none too pleased with this and said, “Well, I think most people were here to see us as we are on Matador.” I was in no mood to get in a pissing match with a musician, so I simply walked away. Several days later we bumped into one another in the Matador offices, as we were all in New York City for the CMJ festival.

In the pastures of middle age, when the difficulties in life are simpler yet can be complicated by the spilling of apple juice, finding a moment to sink into the electric hum of guitars requires planning. Choices are made based on the effects that they have on one’s ability to navigate through to the next day and provide a modicum of the appearance of responsibility. In my office, the records climb the walls, the compact discs wrestle for space, and books long ago read ply for space on cheap warping particle board shelves. Downstairs, the stereo is surrounded by more compact discs and a few long lost but just discovered cassettes, with every vinyl record I have purchased over the past three years stacked underneath. Most are unopened, as I buy them out of habit, by rote as I navigate the various websites to purchase music. Again, as I did twenty years ago as the buyer for Used Kids, I either order directly from the labels (both Matador/Beggars and Merge are favorites, as their LPs contain download codes) or obtain new music from e-music (I subscribe to the connoisseur plan, 75 downloads a month) or get it on the cheap from Amazon. I usually run out of my downloads from E-music within a week and wrestle with whether I want purchase more downloads. Like a fat man eating pizza, I don’t always taste what I shove in my mouth—I consume and forget how to digest the music I hear. I find favorites for a moment (currently Bare Wires, Justin Townes Earle, and Love is All) and continue to be bowled over by old friends like Superchunk and Teenage Fanclub.

Over our lifetimes, we gather, hoard, and discard, playing a mathematical game of emotion versus materialism. I have spent the last nine years quitting—quitting drinking, quitting screwing around on my wife, trying to quit eating shitty food, quitting expecting myself to be someone who I may have been but can no longer be. I have seen the destruction of longing and attachment eat up the ones I love the most, leaving bare spaces of loss in my psyche that I try to fill up with a new life of young children and, of course, music.

Sometimes I play a mental game, revisiting myself as a younger man wading into a scene I was once very much a part of. Now I sit outside the lines, learning to not so gracefully be a bystander to the lives of others who are a bit younger and a bit more curious. I can see myself picking up a bottle at whatever show is playing at Columbus’s newest version of Staches (this year it is the Summit) and making the young women cackle and the men nod in agreement. I realize that with my graying hair sticking out like a thorny bush, a slight paunch not from alcohol but from exhaustion, and daily stubble that resembles tiny bits of prickly confetti scattered around my mouth as if they were a small parade for the losers, I would be a mess in a matter of hours. I would pine for my new self while wrestling for a time that came and went and was left asunder by alcoholism and mental illness that, fortunately, never held me hostage. Instead, I climb into bed early, even when I have the notion to huddle next to the stage, bobbing my head back and forth while a band plays loud and passionately.

I got an email from my cousin’s wife a few months ago asking if I was going to Las Vegas for the Matador Anniversary show—three nights of memories that would not be a nostalgia act but a celebration. I gazed at the lineup: Superchunk, Guided by Voices, Chavez, Pavement, and Yo La Tengo. These names brought me back to some of the happiest moments of my life, as they provided a soundtrack to a life that I lived and still live. They all meant something personal to me, either by casual relationships or because of the sheer beauty of the music they made. Superchunk’s music defined several breakups in my life. Their album Foolish provided me with solace as I maneuvered through several fleeting relationships in 1995, grappling with the fact that perhaps a fuckup means you’re not able to sustain any type of relationship that requires being able to navigate the end of a night without some assistance from a bottle. Likewise, Here’s to Shutting Up provided the balm to me when, at the ripe age of thirty-three, I was as broken and shattered as the plane imagery of that album, with lines such as “plane crash footage on tee-vee, I know that could be me” (“Phone Sex”), and “they’re building skeletons out of steel” (“The Animal Has Left It’s Shell”) and another song “Out on a Wing”, the record eerily mirrored the tragedy of the Twin Towers. Sometimes, crawling inside of a record is the safest thing a person can do, safer than the clutch of another body holding on for dear life as the emotions drip from the ending of and the beginnings of dreams. In the comfort of sound, we could be who we dreamed to be, with invisible walls that drew attention away from the bewildering aspects of our lives, we found consolation in sound. Even water is drawn to water, so it was the underground sounds found is home in those of us who choose to live outside the parameters set for us. The fact that most of us were white, (somewhat) college educated, and prone to make cynical and ironic statements made us prone to derision by some, surely not the same amount of derision we felt for much of mainstream culture.

As my wife and I visited Gainesville in the late spring of 2001, we stayed in hotel in the middle of the University of Florida campus. The atmosphere was thick with smoke erupting out of fires that had engulfed much of central Florida. As I gazed out into the swamp of the campus, the environment thick with green, creeping plants and the encroaching smoke snarling the hopes I had for a successful marriage, I had a feeling that the fires did not portend a hopeful year. While there offering my newlywed spouse the fragile words of encouragement for a lifelong and very adult dream of teaching fine arts to adults, I felt a touch of sickness for myself and for her, in her dreams I slowly realized that a part of mine was shifting, disintegrating around me. Snaggled and constricted like the smoke that was slowing covering the ground below. Appropriately one of the most painful songs on Here’s to Shutting Up that I repeatedly subjected myself to, is titled “Florida’s on Fire.”

After gazing at the line-up for the anniversary show, I emailed my wife, whose last concert was five years ago (Sonic Youth and the Flaming Lips). I was startled by the fact that she said that she might consider attending. Sadly, but with a tiny amount of relief, I realized that the event would be held during my monthly weekend of graduate school classes. We could not attend. I would be in Cleveland, learning how to be more skilled in the act of providing clinical compassion. In the years since giving up the bottle, I have learned that I suffer from a social phobia. It is with a small sense of dread that I attend concerts. I set little rules for myself when attending shows—I go late, usually when the band I want to see is ready to go on and I leave when I grow tired. Last month I saw Titus Andronicus, staying for only about six songs. I thought that they were brilliant, but I had to get up the next morning and shuffle off to work after helping balance a jittery house filled with two over-anxious youngsters. I know that I can’t operate on as little sleep as I once did, even without a hangover. Seeing Pavement earlier this month was a pleasant experience, but I had no desire to wander up to the stage or try to talk to the band that once slept on my floor after I booked them several times in Columbus. I sat back and marveled at the easy pleasure they had in playing old songs and how well they all looked. Tonight the reformed Guided by Voices are playing in a show that may be one of their only Columbus shows that I did not have a hand, I haven’t decided if I am going to go yet (I did decide to go and had a wonderful time). Perhaps more than any other band, I have been identified with GBV, mostly due to the fact that a very good bootleg was recorded at my 26^th birthday party when they were hitting their stride. Crying Your Knife Away was recorded shortly before Bee Thousand was released and after Alien Lanes was already finished (Alien Lanes was tentatively called Scalping the Guru at the time). We were all friends then, but over the course of time we have become un-friends. This is not due to any squabbling, but my own interests rise and fall as every diaper is changed.

In the newest New Yorker, Sasha Frere-Jones writes a somewhat dismissive article about Pavement, accusing the band in not-so-subtle terms of playing reserved and couching their sound in an attitude built around their supposed “normalcy” to exclude people who were unlike them.  He thus dismisses the cultural times that the band was created in—that of Ronald Reagan and George Bush senior, the aforementioned prefab shit of eighties hair-metal, the radio bombast of Phil Collins, and the tepidness of inauthentic rebels like Billy Idol and Bon Jovi, who were about as dangerous as a two-liter bottle of Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers. Mr. Jones misses the point. We longed for normalcy to combat the force-fed tripe many of us suffered through while growing up in high schools across the land. There were sonic oases to be found on the far-left bands of FM radio stations and in the bins of local record stores. It was bands like Pavement, Guided by Voices, Mudhoney, and Superchunk that bound us together, providing the belief and determination that we didn’t have to buy the bill of goods that mainstream America was throwing against the wall. If anything, Pavement brought the warm, reality-based sounds of the Velvet Underground into the nineties, and they had enough self assurance not to have to wear sunglasses indoors or have tattoos of women whose breasts were as big as watermelons on their arms. There was no need to pretend to be something else—a Disney version of rock & roll—because we were self assured enough in our own lives to realize that we may not have known what we wanted, but we did know what we didn’t want. If you were in the middle of Mr. Jones, so-called clique, it didn’t feel that way, it felt like home.

After having spent a vast amount of time trying to tear our worlds down night by night, beer by beer, shot by shot, and note by note, I now spend my days trying to rebuild lives, sentence by sentence, listen by listen, and patience by patience. It is an ongoing struggle that is tempered by the gold soundz of my MP3 player.

Jenny Mae & Jerry Wick part 38: First Death

First Death.

Every time I visit my memories I bump into the dead, who curl around my thoughts like wisps of smoke rising up and disintegrating into the air, silent but ever present in spite of my busy life filled with middle-aged responsibilities. As my two fair-haired children dance for me, arms extended as if only I can temper the giddiness that shoots like downed power lines from their frantic arms, I think of moments of true escape from the closed dread of an ordinary life that I once both at times strived for and repelled with all of my might. Sleep comes harder but is more restful as I wade into my forties, with the experiences someone who has seen breathtaking beauty and horror in the same moment but with the fear of a mortality that has yet to enter my children’s life. There is a story that the Buddha’s father tried in vain to protect his son from the destruction of life, but it wasn’t until Shakyamuni Buddha witnessed the true revulsion of life that he became determined to vanquish his attachment to the material world and the causes of suffering. At times, as I gaze down at the blond jewels of my life, the sparkling of life emanating out of their big blue eyes, setting each moment on fire, I gaze into their future, trying in vain to protect them from the tragedies of survival. I am nothing but a bystander as the moments tick past, and the floor of life rises faster than anything my eyes has ever held It is pointless to try to protect them. As a father, I can only try to help them navigate tragedies as they appear in their lives, for in surviving one is the constant spectator of both the elegance and ugliness of life.

After my breakup with Jenny, I couch surfed in Columbus for a few months and rented a small apartment in Athens. I would make my getaway to Athens on the weekends, spending time at The Union Bar on West State Street. As a boy, I spent my afternoons in uptown Athens at the Side-One Record store that stood almost exactly across the street from the Union. This was in the late 70s and early 80s, when I was in middle-school. Both the store and the town provided a purpose to me, as I searched for a family that had disintegrated in the hushed tones of secrets and mental illness that, sadly, have remained unchecked for thirty years.

Side-One was a sliver of a store wedged between the underground comic book/used record store/tee-shirt shop known as Hoffa’s and The Underwear. It sold mostly cut-out LP’s with a few new releases. The two men who ran it, were kind to me. Taking a gawky, nerdy kid of eleven under their wings, they let me play records and howled as I mimicked the bass lines of late 70’s funk and “Another One Bites The Dust.” They seemed to live the easy life, sipping beers behind the counter and playing Herman Brood and His Wild Romance at top volume. Across the street, stood the Union, a townie biker bar that sold hot dogs for a dollar and let me in to order for the gentlemen from the record shop. I knew at that early age what I wanted from life—an opportunity to escape into the safe confines of laughter and music. Sadly, Side-One closed up shop the summer of my seventh grade year, forced out by the larger and more in-depth School Kids Records, a semi-loose brand of indie-stores that catered to the punk and college rock of university campuses in Big Ten country.

Every college town had one. In Columbus we had two: Bernie’s & Staches. In Champaign it was the Blind Pig, Cleveland had the Euclid Tavern, and Chapel Hill had the Cat’s Cradle. While I never visited Champaign or Chapel Hill, those night clubs were known country-wide as safe -havens for the near drop-outs, rockers, and bookish music nerds of the American underground scene. The Blind Pig was made famous by the long forgotten Honcho Overload, who described the best method of romantic revenge as getting wasted. The Cat’s Cradle was the clubhouse of all things North Carolina, namely Superchunk, who provided the soundtrack of our lives and deaths.

Athens had a pretty health music scene that was a bit more ragged, freakish, and organic than the hardened punkish and ironic sounds of Columbus. Folks in Athens were more prone to dance, even to the bizarre hardness of some of the Amphetamine Reptile bands, such as The Cows and Surgery, who played there often. The most popular bands in Athens were the majestic Appalachian Death Ride and Torque, who managed to get the gritty, metallic hate of the Amrep bands down to a science. I was more inclined to ADR, whose sounds came from the same organic roots as such like-minded bands of the time as Mudhoney, early Soul Asylum, and Eleventh Dream Day, bands whose high school record collections contained not only Neil Young, but also The Stooges, Black Sabbath, and early hardcore.

Torque branded itself as hate rock. They were led by a large, good-looking singer-guitarist named Pat Brown, whose girth was offset by his glinting blue eyes and good-natured laugh. He never wanted for a woman. The drummer, Ted O’Neal, was a friendly, handsome man who had long dark locks of curly hair that no doubt played a part in him securing a breathtakingly beautiful woman named Marissa. Ted manned several bars in Athens, including the Union and Tony’s. Tony’s was the underground version of a sports bar, where you could go to watch the Browns on a Sunday afternoon while My Bloody Valentine, Prisonshake, or Gram Parsons provided the play-by-play. Ted was the best kind of bartender. He freely provided me with a two-for-one special every time I ordered. This was manna for a happy drunkard.

The Union was a long bar, with small booths crammed against the wall just a body-width from the long bar that ran 2/3 the length of the building. There was a small area in which those delicious hot dogs were made and a back area that held a pool table and one shitty Simpson’s video game. The club portion was upstairs—a shoe box of a concert setting containing a large stage with sightlines that were hindered by support columns and the use of too many intoxicants. This was nothing to complain about, as the crowds in Athens always moved to the music, whether it was Tar, The Cynics, or a local art-school experiment. The walls were covered with Pabst Blue Ribbon signs and the shoddy, amateurish paintings of patrons who aspired to be more than the sum of their talents (as we all do).

I used some of my contacts to help book several shows at the Union, as I was, by this time, getting my feet wet and wallet soaked promoting shows in Columbus at Bernie’s and Staches. But for every money-making show with Love Battery, Sebadoh, or Pavement, there were money-gulping shows like Moonshake, the aforementioned Eleventh Dream Day, the Grifters, and the incredible Thinking Fellers Union Local 282. I had helped arrange some show in the fall of 1994 at the Union. I have no idea what it was, but I was in the midst of developing my talent as a baffling, hysterical, frenzied, alcoholic being. Prone to an elevated state of being fueled by Jim Beam, long-neck beers, and copious amounts of coffee, I could somehow channel the energy of my future children. This usually brought about tears of laughter to my eyes, as I was a stand-up comic in my own head. Many of the onlookers got my joke (i.e., the joke was me), but others were embarrassed. I had no impulse control.

Ted lived with Eric Gunn, whose love for all things hateful was only surpassed by an obsessive record- collecting gene. He had boxes of records spread out in his damp, semi-crooked house that smelled of perpetual marijuana smoke, stale alcohol, damp carpet, and the mustiness that only a large wolf-like dog can provide. I spent several nights on the uneven couch in that house. The after-hours would be cramped with people huddled around the worn coffee table. As the bong was passed, I would demur—I had no use for anything that would impede the racing buzz that flowed through my body. I stood at full drunken power, rapidly describing the different life choices of me and my Green Beret brother, who lived in Athens and knew many of the Union regulars but had a life of college classrooms, rugby, and bars.

Although much of that time is faded, fuzzy, and forgotten, I do remember a comical discussion my brother and I had about him wanting to give me gun. I had tried to describe to him how I was unhinged, and that putting a gun in my hands was akin to giving an anvil to a drowning man. I remember Ted and Marissa laughing as the verbal bolts of lightning shot out of my mouth and into the room. A week later, Ted lay in a hospital bed in Columbus, clutching to life as a shot of heroin proved too much for his battered body. Ted hung on for two weeks, during which time visiting friends met and shared memories at my house. I slowly fell in love with my first wife during this time, even though I was seeing another woman from Athens. As Ted struggled to regain consciousness, I became enamored with Robin, who had dark black hair and a wickedly fast sense of humor. We would gather in my obtuse living room, drinking beer and trading stories as each of us thought of death, lust and friendship in our own separate manner.

Ted was buried in Dayton. We gathered at Pat Brown’s  parents house. His parents exuded Republican, Midwestern values—his mother made Velveeta Mexican dip with Triscuits and we were all on our best behavior. As I pulled out of the cemetery and drove back to Athens with a woman I would break up within a matter of days as I tried to seduce my first wife, I popped in an advance copy of Bee Thousand and listened to “Ester’s Day” over and over. Ted was the first friend who died in my life.

Jenny Mae & Jerry Wick part 32: The Fruits of Happenstance part II

The Fruits of Happenstance part two:

Jeff Graham was a different sort of musician from the type that I was used to; he had short hair that was slightly gelled, he had good teeth, no tattoos and he drove a large Land Rover. This was in stark contrast to most of the musicians I had known, even the ones who I got to know through my being a middling promoter of smallish proportions. I was quite skeptical of Jeff, my biases towards others that did not co-habitat the insular world of which I flourished tended to have an adverse effect on my willingness to venture into any sort of semblance towards mainstream culture. An attitude for which I still cling to at times with a measured tone of sanity; I will not venture into a mall today nor have I ever watched a “reality” television show. Jeff was perhaps the first “professional” engineer I had ever met, in fact of all the artists I had dealt with over the years I can only think of a few who came across as treating their craft as a professional: Dave Thomas of Pere Ubu, John Cale, Walter Salas-Humera (of the Silos) and the saxophonist Charles Gayle. The rest of the people I bumped into in the confined indie-rock world seemed cut from the same cloth as me, somewhat surprised and nonchalant about building a career out of music and always willing to sit for a drink.

Getting to know Jeff was a joy, he was good humored but serious and he was able to help Jenny not to be lazy in the studio and with her music. She was able to adhere to Jeff’s direction and he could coax her with humor and an ever flowing storage of Dewar’s. The fact that she was playing with Dan Spurgeon, whose songwriting talent could be devastatingly powerful, provided her some of the needed self-confidence she may have lacked in her earlier endeavors. Like many of us, Jenny did not like to challenge herself, at times life is easier to take when the emotional muscles of intrinsic effort may take one of kilter. We grounded ourselves in alcohol, sex and music and to challenge one of these was a risk many of us were frightened to take. Jenny had learned from Bob Pollard that a song can be perfect when written as a whole that is all at once. She would write the melody and add lyrics later, usually just snippets of something she heard or at times she would borrow some of my poetry and use some of these.

On “Don’t Wait Up for Me” she started working a bit harder on her lyrics but at times she was still hesitant to make the songs longer or to try to fully tell a story. Jeff helped her with this and my own implorations always fell on deaf ears with her. We had too much history to be able to discuss her music. I had started dating my future wife shortly before the making of this record, and I would drag her to the studio and we would huddle around the large console that took up a large part of the basement studio. Drinking beer and doing shots as Jeff played back the songs, my wife must have thought that my life was much more exotic than it really was. Boy, was she in for a wake-up call.

As the songs started to evolve I sent a few off to my friend James Hunter who was a freelance writer and worked as a scout for several record companies. James is a thin man, whose family provided him with an impeccable taste in music, fashion and the arts, his tastes run to the far end of sophistication but he is discerning enough to understand the loveliness of a Patty Loveless or Pet Shop Boy song over the annoyance of standard pop fair. I had met James several years prior as he introduced himself to me at Used Kids, he would venture up from West Virginia periodically to the bright lights of Columbus as it is often said in Kentucky and West Virginia: “readin, writin, and route 23”. As many of from the southern border states would make the exodus up Route 23 to the hopeful jobs of Franklin County. Jim introduced himself and we hit it off, he was an early supporter of Guided by Voices and he later interviewed me for a story on the underground scene for the New York Times. We hit if off over our joint fondness of classic pop and country music, with our ears perking up to the refined sounds of country stars such as Dwight Yoakum and Merle Haggard to mutual appreciation of the euro-beat sounds of Erasure and New Order to the epic vocalizing of Scott Walker and Dusty Springfield. Jim did not have the fondness of punk rock that I did nor did he embrace the DIY aesthetic of the independent scene that I so readily embraced. The Smashing Pumpkins (whom he adored) were the yin to my yang (Mudhoney) whom he did not appreciate as I did.

Upon receiving the initial tapes I sent him, James called me almost immediately, with a hurried voice full of excitement he exclaimed “this is the best demo I have heard since Basehead and Matthew Sweet.” He could not wrap his mind around the fact that this was Jenny singing, he had met her a few times at some of shows we attended. With her western-southern Ohio drawl, a propensity of saying whatever arouses in her gin-soaked brain, Jenny did not always make the best first or fourth impression. She was liable to snicker in your face with an inside joke that she barely understood herself that could be off putting, but here she was on tape, summoning the sounds of emotional profoundness as she dredged up forlorn darkness into a perfect three minute song.

James was working closely with EMI records at the time, with Davitt Sigerson, a long-time music producer (David & David, The Bangles, Tori Amos) who just took over the failing American branch of EMI Records. He asked me to send a few of the tracks Jenny was recording to Davitt and in a few weeks Davitt asked if Jenny could come and play New York. Jenny and her band had not yet played out, in fact she had not played with a stable backing band in nearly five years, and her live band always consisted of generous souls such as Wil Foster, Jovan Karcic and Derrick DeCinzo.  Davitt seemed serious, and I assume that he thought I would be more experienced than I was having run a label for nearly half a decade and working with various labels and bands over the years. I was a novice, in over my head as I was from the day I was birthed.

In the mid-nineties as the underground scene became above ground commodity there were odd marriages as major labels realized that there was something happening that they did not quite understand. As the business model they were used to shifted under the weight of Nirvana, Pavement, The Smashing Pumpkins and Helmet there were shot-gun marriages of authentically independent labels such as Matador with Atlantic then with Capital, Caroline with Virgin, Amphetamine Reptile with Atlantic and the labels were on the constant hunt for the next independent cash-cow. A readymade band for the masses to swallow without much work or planning. This very rarely succeeded and when it did the results usually ended in disaster such as the case of Nirvana and end the ruined musical careers of countless vital bands. In Ohio the amount of failed experiments could be found in every town: Gaunt, Scrawl, Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, Big Back 40 and V-3 (Columbus), Ass Ponys (Cincinnati), Snapdragons (Athens), Gem  & Bill Fox (Cleveland).

Moviola were starting to record their follow-up to “The Year You Were Born” and were interested in recording in a studio that couldn’t fit into a shoe box and started to record a few songs with James at Diamond Mine. This was not a good marriage but it did garner the interest of Davitt who became interested in signing Anyway to EMI with Jenny Mae and Moviola the two flagship artists. To me this was akin to betting on any Cleveland sports team to win any championship, but I was willing to listen as I took every day as something to beholden. Nothing appeared to phase me, with the exception of the endless stream of precarious romantic relationships I found myself in. I desired nothing more than to feel comfortable with a woman who felt comfortable with me and the way I lived my life. Davitt was working as a consultant on the Blondie comeback record (“No Exit”) and told me that Deborah Harry  was interested in recording one of Jenny’s songs called “Hey Baby”. Much of this would hinge in the New York show. With a handful of practices we left for New York, I had been able to secure a show at Brownies which had always been kind to Columbus bands. Jenny would play an earlier show at nine pm and then would have to leave.

We arrived early and headed to a western themed bar just down the block that I had drank in on previous trips, I quickly met up with my friend Ron who would end up putting out the next Moviola record. His lawyer was a bartender at the bar. Jenny walked in and stumbled out after an hour. Wearing my scraggly clothes, a thread bared SST t-shirt and frayed jeans, unshaven and with an eight hour car ride chased by two hours in a Manhattan country bar I met the President of EMI records. Davitt was a large man, he smoked a cigar that was as large as my wrist and seemed unmoved by my offer of drink as I explained in the most Midwestern manner that I could fathom “we were drinking free”. James was there, he appeared a bit nervous while I was quite content with the way my world was functioning the prospect of teaming of EMI did not move me either way. I would have been relieved if the larger label would just as soon Jenny and Moviola and leave me to lurk in a record store abode, content as a cat in a sunbeam.

Davitt and James sat at table off to the side of the stage, and I huddled at the bar, not knowing what to say to the ambassador of music professionalism. It was not apathy that enveloped my life it was more of being completely unskilled in any sort of communication outside of what was familiar. Choosing the underbelly of life is a pragmatic choice, one made in increments and in short life decisions, dropping a class followed by dropping out of school. Exemplified by staying out too late on a Tuesday night followed next by the Wednesday and Thursday nights, choosing a job that allows extremely casual clothes and times that are congruent with week-night drinking and dancing. When this world is as welcoming as an impassioned lover the disdain for the other side of life grows up and around the philosophy of skepticism of all things conformist.  My pod was just fine, thank you but at the same time I yearned for Jenny and Moviola to have large-scale success as I did for all of my friends. I was happy to be a conduit to their success, although I did not necessarily want a piece of it.

The club was half filled when Jenny played, a few fans were there, James McNew from Yo La Tengo and Lisa Carver were present and I was pleased an old girlfriend of mine showed up perhaps I thought, she will invite me home. Jenny played a ragged set, the band was dressed in suits and this was their first live show together, she was visibly drunk her nervousness showed like a pimple on an otherwise clear face. Any sophistication that was evident on the recordings was displaced by too many glasses of Dewar’s and Iron Horse beer. After the show, Jenny stumbled up and met Davitt; she grinned and patted his large belly. That sealed the deal, he was no longer interested. Not only that but any talk of Deborah Harry recording one her songs went out the window with the ill-fated tap upon the stomach of the President of EMI. Shortly thereafter, the recordings that Moviola were making with James disintegrated into infighting and apprehension made it evident that neither Moviola nor EMI were interested in one another. Jenny would continue to record “Don’t Wait Up For Me” not concerned about the brief flirtation with a major label, as we scurried back to Ohio filled with one night of free booze and the pleasure of seeing old friends. I made it back to that ex-girlfriend’s apartment only to throw up and pass out before I could display any of my refined cuddling tools.  The puking a perfect metaphor for the trip.

davitt sigerson

davitt sigerson